


Femslash and sex-writing essays

by breathedout



Series: Meta Essays [3]
Category: Multi-Fandom
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Archived from havingbeenbreathedout blog, Meta Essay, Nonfiction, Not 'Explicit' per se but there are frank discussions of sex and sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-03
Updated: 2018-12-03
Packaged: 2019-09-06 12:54:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16833013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Various essays on the politics and practice of sex writing, particularly f/f sex writing.The first chapter is a post originally written for @femslashrevolution on Tumblr, as part of their I Am Femslash event, and posted on February 3, 2017. Original publication dates of subsequent chapters go backward in time, and are listed in the chapter notes.





	1. On the personal as normal; on the normal as political

**Author's Note:**

> I'm backing up my fannish essays from Tumblr so as not to lose them if/when the censorship of adult content comes for my blog. Apologies to those getting spammed with years-old meta.

A few months ago I had a conversation about pubic hair, with a lover of mine. _Your bush is super hot_ , my lover said. _I’m blushing_ , I said. Then she asked: was my decision not to shave a political one, or just a “this is fckn sexy” one? And at that last question—I wasn’t sure what it was, or why it was happening, but something reared up in me. Some looming, rebellious objection. It wasn’t my lover’s fault; she is a thoughtful and considerate communicator, and had done nothing wrong. And it was strange, to feel as I did; because it wasn’t as if I was new to the idea of female body hair being a site of political dissension. I’m thirty-five years old; I was hassled by my schoolfriends in middle school for not shaving my legs and hassled by my girlfriend in high school and my Womyn’s Center mates in college for shaving them. Patti Smith’s _Easter_ , with its iconographic pit hair has pride of place on my record shelf. I have done my time in the trenches of feminist debate, and when I was younger I spent my fair share of time agonizing over which personal grooming strategy made me “the best feminist.“ 

But the truth is that these days, twenty years on, my selective hair removal—I shave my legs and my pits, but not my bush—feels, to me, neither politically motivated nor even particularly intentional. Instead it feels _normal_. It’s one of the myriad little habits that makes feel at home in my body, in that deeply comfortable and worn-in sense of "at home” that comes from being able to walk around one’s apartment barefoot, in the dark, while thinking about the last scene in one’s novel rather than where one is placing one’s feet. It’s a level of at-home-ness; of ownership and normalcy, that means conscious thought is superfluous. And though I acknowledge the usefulness, in many contexts, of interrogating received wisdom and assumptions about what constitutes “womanly” or “hygienic” female behavior, I would argue that in this world—this world which, today more than ever, teaches women never to be at home in our bodies, never to be comfortable in our bodies, never to stop thinking about our bodies and feeling guilt and shame about our bodies—that there is value to carving out spaces of personal _normalcy_ , as well: space for us to breathe into all our inconsistent and idiosyncratic ways. 

What does all this have to do with femslash? Glad you asked. 

I am no longer a fandom newbie, but neither am I a long-time veteran of the wars. I wandered wide-eyed into fandom in my late 20s, already a full-grown adult: a near-lesbian in a foundering long-term relationship with a man, I was also a crafter and feminist and compulsive reader of literary fiction; and I was looking, with mercenary intensity, for writing which explicitly portrayed the kind of sexual complexity with which I was struggling in my personal life, and which I was pointedly not finding in published fiction. I knew zilch about fandom traditions or fandom political histories; all those fandom battles which old-timers were already heartily sick of fighting. I just knew: god! Here were people writing about sex (between men) so viscerally compellingly that even I could understand the appeal: I, who have always felt vaguely repulsed by men’s society and men’s bodies—even, inconveniently, the bodies of men I loved.

And even though my lack of fandom context led to me doing and saying some things in those early days that were, in retrospect, kind of embarrassingly naïve and lacking in nuance, I’m glad that I was ignorant of the larger fandom dynamics around lady/lady sex writing (or hey, around lady/lady writing at all [or hey, around writing about women, full stop]). Because my ignorance meant that when I discovered an entire new-to-me, female-dominated community writing complicated, explicit sex scenes, full of longing and messy exploration and bodily fluids, I could blunder right into writing about women conflictedly fucking other women; conflictedly fighting with other women; conflictedly forgiving other women and reconnecting with other women and betraying other women and taking care of other women and bittersweetly remembering other women. Because why wouldn’t I write about that? That was, to my fandom-naïve eye, _the normal thing to do_ in this subculture into which I’d wandered. 

Unsurprisingly, this provoked some interesting reactions.

Due in part to my ignorance when I came on the scene, I’ve since had a lot of interactions and internal debates, and witnessed a lot of fandom dust-ups, about those three things: writing female characters; and writing female characters in relationship to other female characters; and writing female characters fucking other female characters. (I have also written a lot about this, as well.) Some of these interactions have involved talking about why folks write queer women characters. More of them have revolved around why folks don’t; or don’t like to; or don’t think it’s a fair thing to ask; or don’t like it when I do. Common objections I’ve heard to writing and reading women fucking women include: there are fewer female characters in source media (or they’re not as interesting), so finding them and developing investment in them requires more work; f/f writing doesn’t get as much attention, and it is disheartening to choose political correctness over reader response; writing female bodies while living in a female body in a culture that hates female bodies is more emotionally difficult/traumatic; female bodies are gross; the mainstream hypersexualization of lesbians means that is it anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex among women, especially kinky sex; mainstream objectification of female bodies means it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write sex _involving_ women, especially kinky sex; the omnipresence of sexist tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write female characters as anything less than morally exemplary, which is boring; the omnipresence of homophobic tropes in media mean that it is anywhere from uncomfortable to morally wrong to write a story that deviates from the anti-trope script (e.g. “happy lesbians with well-balanced relationships”), which is boring; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and including female sexuality is too close to home to be enjoyable; fandom space is supposed to be escapist and fun, and expecting hobbyists to be warriors in the army of capital-r Representation is obnoxious; fandom space is dominated by young women, and expecting _them_ to be warriors in the army of capital-R Representation is sexist when we don’t hold middle-aged male media creators to the same standard. 

I could write an essay about each of these, some of which are really complex points with some merit. But I think one thing that stands out, from a majority of my interactions on this issue through the years, is **the perception that the act of writing relationships among women is inherently political, in a way that the act of writing about relationships among men is not.**

The $64,000 question: do I agree with this?

Are electrons particles, or waves?

I mean, let’s get this out of the way: if writing about women is political, then writing about men is political, too. Masculinity is constructed as the default flavor of humanity in our society, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t bear critical examination, nor does it mean that the actions of men aren’t informed by their socialization, or that everyone’s perceptions of men aren’t informed by power structures. Nor does it mean that men are immune from the toxic effects of life in a heteronormative patriarchy. If we as writers experience a focus on men to be a relaxing break from the stifling responsibility of depicting oppression, that is (a) pretty understandable, since that’s the myth of the (white cis hetero) male experience that’s sold to us from birth, but also (b) probably in need of some interrogation, since it doesn’t actually reflect anyone’s lived reality. Not even the lived reality of dude-bros who roll their eyes at the words “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”; and ESPECIALLY not the lived reality of queer men, who are, let’s remember, real people with a real history and a real present of active oppression due to their orientation. 

As to the question of queer women: was I right or wrong, in my fandom-naïve days, to assume that writing sex and relationships among women is essentially the same as writing those things among men? 

Yes. That is, I think I was right, and also wrong.

In [a 1995 essay](https://books.google.com/books?id=X2ETCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA329&lpg=PA329&dq=paula+rust+%22The+personal+reflects+the+political+status+quo+\(with+the+implication+that+the+personal+should+be+examined+to+provide+insight+into+the+political\)%22&source=bl&ots=nUG3CqMA3C&sig=s6CeAzG3siVTTJqKT2k9kaO1xPw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZjte9ytvRAhUG4GMKHVGHBfEQ6AEIIDAB#v=onepage&q=paula%20rust%20%22The%20personal%20reflects%20the%20political%20status%20quo%20\(with%20the%20implication%20that%20the%20personal%20should%20be%20examined%20to%20provide%20insight%20into%20the%20political\)%22&f=false), Paula Rust enumerates many of the widely divergent and in some cases mutually incompatible interpretations of the oft-quoted second-wave feminist slogan “The personal is political”:

> The personal reflects the political status quo (with the implication that the personal should be examined to provide insight into the political); the personal serves the political status quo; one can make personal choices in response to or protest against the political status quo; one’s personal life influences one’s personal politics or determines the limits of one’s understanding of the political status quo; the personal is a personal political statement; personal choices can influence the political status quo; one’s personal choices reveal or reflect one’s personal politics; one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s personal politics; personal life and personal politics are indistinguishable; personal life and personal politics are unrelated.

If we adapt Rust’s terminology slightly to accommodate the act of reading and writing fiction, so that “the personal” becomes something more like “individualized character depictions,” then I think this passage becomes a useful tool in breaking down how we think about reading and writing women versus how we think about reading and writing men. It seems to me that often, when we are reading and writing about men (especially cis white men who are canonically assumed to be straight even if they fuck in fanfic), our attitudes tend to hang out in the spectrum ranging from, on the more nuanced end, **“choices about individualized character depictions can be made in response to or protest against the status quo”** to, on the less nuanced end, **“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated.”** Since straight white men are the default, depicting them doesn’t feel primarily political. It feels _normal_. Things that happen to straight white male characters seem not to carry the burdensome weight of responsibility and representation that plagues female characters, especially queer female characters or female characters of color. The unspoken logic here posits that the things that happen to men, just happen! The traits men have are just traits! Men can be evaluated as individuals, because there is nothing to distract from that individuality. No matter that whiteness/straightness/maleness is not actually _nothing_ , only an invisible _something_ ; and never mind that the completeness of the divorce between individualized character depictions and greater political realities is to a large extent illusory. The fact remains that that’s often the in-the-moment experience of reading and writing about male characters: they can exist as individuals, because their maleness is the norm. 

By contrast, when we are reading and writing about women (especially queer women and women of color), our default assumptions tend to range from **“individualized character depictions can influence the political status quo”** to **“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable.”** It is burdensome to write about queer women because we feel that every individualized queer woman character we write, in her body and her actions, must both bear the brunt of, and actively resist, all that baggage listed above. She must subvert (on a meta level) and/or stand against (on an in-story level) the tide of mainstream objectification, of lesbian hypersexualization, of sexist and homophobic tropes, of poor treatment and shoddy development at the hands of media creators, and on and on. Everything that happens to her or doesn’t happen to her, every physical trait and every mental tic, is massively overdetermined, because we feel that to write about queer women is to body forth our own personal politics into the world—and, more than that, to transform the landscape of queer female representation entire. 

OBVIOUSLY, as a writer and reader this is neither fun nor possible! No character can do this. 

Please let that sink in. No character can do this. No character is so well-written that she is going to transcend the Oppression Soup in which we all swim; and even if she did, she would not be enough transform the landscape of queer female representation into an egalitarian wonderland. We can stop hitching our wagons to that star because it’s not going to happen. Good news! We are not failures because we fall short of this demonstrably impossible metric! Similarly: my friends and I can install low-flow shower heads in every bathroom in every apartment we move into, from now until our deaths, but we are still not going to offset the effect of Nestlé extracting 36 million gallons of water per year from our national forests to bottle and sell at a profit. Or again: my personal choice to make my own clothes, though potentially politically meaningful to me as an individual, is never going to counteract the coercive power of a global fashion industry that earns $3 trillion a year peddling the lie that women who are larger than a size 10, or who don’t have expendable income to keep up with the latest trends, are not employable, fuckable, or worth taking seriously. This is not to say that making my own clothes can’t be politically meaningful for me personally. Nor is it to say that I am incapable of meaningful political action: I can help to take on these oppressive and exploitative industries via mass organizing: public actions, legal challenges, legislative lobbying, investigative exposés, mass boycotts. But there is absolutely nothing that I alone can do, with my body or my apartment or my novel, that will dismantle these power structures. 

For one thing, this is not how institutional oppression works. Yes, the ramifications of oppressive power structures can manifest in intimate details of one’s life, and it does well to be conscious of that. But the causality doesn’t work in reverse: identifying and purging artefacts of oppression from the intimate details of one’s life, while potentially personally meaningful or satisfying, won’t meaningfully reduce the overall strength of the originating oppressive power structures in society at large. I cannot take down the fashion industry by making my own clothes. I cannot save the world from Nestlé by installing low-flow shower heads. I cannot dismantle sexism and heteronormativity by writing a queer female character who carries perfectly on her shoulders the representation of every oppression she suffers, and perfectly represents my personal authorial politics—or, indeed, by writing a host of such characters, and sharing them with a few thousand people on the internet. This needs to stop being the expectation, or even the ideal. **To hold the queer female character to such a standard is to make of her even more of an unattainable exception to human existence than she already is:** for none of us can stand in for All Women, or All Queers, or All Queer Women; and none of us should be asked to do so. 

For another thing, this is not how fiction works. Fiction doesn’t convince through intellectual perfection. Fiction convinces through building empathy and voluntary identification in readers for characters who may or may not be wildly different from them, and may or may not be placed in radically different situations than they have ever found themselves in, but whom they the readers, on some basic human level, nonetheless _recognize_. Crafting an individual character who inspires that kind of gut-level recognition is difficult if the author is assembling them primarily as anti-oppression talisman rather than a flawed and complicit individual; or if the author is undermining the voluntary nature of the reader’s identification by making the character, Ayn Rand-style, a prostelytizing mouthpiece for the author’s own philosophy. I think this is part of what people mean, when they object that writing women, or queer women, or women of color, feels “too political”: the strictures of talisman-creation undermine the ability to foster empathy for a real-seeming individual. But this is not a problem with writing queer women! It’s a problem with the unrealistic expectations we’ve placed on ourselves around doing so. 

I mean, for my money, the way to craft characters who do inspire this gut-level sense of recognition is to draw on one’s own experiences—one’s own passions and one’s own struggles—while also refraining from providing neat and tidy solutions to which real people (and hence characters in the moment) do not have access. People are messy; we have to be able to let our characters be messy. To paraphrase John Waters, who surely knows whereof he speaks: we have to let our characters make US uncomfortable. We have to let them make us feel queasy and ambivalent sometimes, just as we sometimes make ourselves feel that way. We have to let ourselves discover things through the journey of writing and reading that we did not know when we started out. 

Does this mean there is no point in research, no point in educating ourselves about over-used tropes and the history and current reality of queer representation, no point in critiquing media that perpetuates these tropes? Of course it doesn’t mean that. The goal—my goal, anyway—is to write characters who ring true to life, who come off as real people, with real struggles. And in order to do that, a writer needs to be familiar with the toxic and un-lifelike nonsense that gets endlessly recycled in media. It’s helpful to know, for example, that the “lesbian dies, goes mad, or returns to the heterosexual fold at novel’s end” trope was originally imposed on lesbian pulp writers as a condition of publication if they wanted to avoid obscenity charges: here is an example that’s, VERY clearly, not an artefact of lesbian reality but an artificial and homophobic narrative imposed from without. I think it’s valid to make the point that maybe, in this year of our apocalypse 2017, we have reached a point where this narrative should be largely avoided. 

But you know: there are a lot of artificial and homophobic narratives. And there are even more narratives that, while not intrinsically artificial or homophobic, have so often been twisted that way as to be forever tainted by suspicion and pain. And that suspicion and pain twist back into real lived experience in ways that can be complicated and unpredictable. If our culture is a house, then so many of its walls are built of tainted narratives, and so many of its other walls are built up against those tainted walls, that it’s very difficult to dismantle the structure, or determine what’s sound and what’s not. As a real-life queer woman, I have never met an anti-oppression talisman, but I have met plenty of queer women who have made me uncomfortable—myself at the top of my own list. Though I squirm at the “lesbian goes crazy” novel ending, I have known many queer women, myself included, who struggle with mental illness (as well as many who don’t). Though I have noped out of media for egregious and self-serving use of the “lesbian was just waiting for the right man” trope, I myself am a near-lesbian who once fell in love with a man, and I know others who have done the same (as well as many who haven’t). Though I share the frustration over the assumption that bisexual characters are universally flighty and commitment-averse, I also know several flighty and promiscuous bisexuals (and many bisexuals who are neither, and many flighty and promiscuous straight folks). Though I cringe a little at depictions of alcoholism and drug abuse in queer female culture, I am myself a queer woman with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. In a cringe-y catch-22, I am deeply uncomfortable with both the demonization of the working-class butch/femme subculture by the middle and upper classes of lesbian society AND ALSO with the degree of forcibly normative gender expectations I personally have encountered in butch/femme environments… so I decided to go ahead and write a whole novel about that, despite the fact that I might avoid someone else’s treatment of the same subject matter. 

The pattern here is hopefully obvious: even drawing from the pool of my own personal lived stories, many verge on or overlap with narratives that are often toxic in their execution. So what are we to do? Does all this add up to a wash, a free pass for the continuation of any tired and harmful trope imaginable? No. It adds up to a call for a nuanced and subjective calculus around analyzing works of art: an acknowledgement that some versions of Narrative X or Character Y will spark that sense of recognition or that shock of injury for audience members, and others won’t, and others will for some audience members but not for others, and all of that is valid to talk about. And it also adds up to a call for writers of queer female characters—especially those of us who are queer and/or female ourselves—to allow ourselves the freedom to write individualized queer women who, though they may not body forth our personal politics, make us familiarly uncomfortable. Characters with whom we are intimate. 

Characters with whom we feel at home. 

Taking a larger view, I think that we need to close the gap between our reading and writing of men, especially straight white men (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are unrelated”) and our reading and writing of women, especially queer women and women of color (“individualized character depictions and personal politics are indistinguishable”). Both sides need to shift. Neither extreme is true, and we are doing a disservice to all our characters, and our works, if we disregard the nuance that lives between them. But more intensely, and more specifically, I would argue that where queer female characters are concerned we need to work toward an attitude that— **however partially and strategically** —begins to uncouple “individual character representation” from “personal authorial politics,” and does so with the express goal of allowing these characters _normality_. Weird, inconsistent, flawed, complicated, mundane normality. We need to let go of the intimidating and paralyzing attitude that queerness and femaleness raise the political stakes in such a way that mundane fuckups, either on the part of the author or the character, are no longer allowed. 

To extend the analogies from earlier: if we have the water pressure to support it, we should install low-flow showerheads, not because we can thereby compensate for the evils of Nestlé, but to save on our water bills. And if we have the time and inclination we might make our own clothes, not because it will magically deliver us from the perils of the beauty industry, because it it a mode of self-expression that is also personally empowering. And if we can, we should write and read complex, flawed queer female characters, and support others who write and read them, because to do so enables us—real-life queer women, and people who know real-life queer women, and even people who might be intimidated or repulsed by real-life queer women—to feel that real-life queer women, in all their flawed and problematic glory, are more human; more at home; more recognized. Closer to the range of the normal. 

None of these things is going to save the world, and we don’t need them to. They are important and life-sustaining anyway.


	2. In conversation with bootsandblossoms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An excerpt from a conversation with @bootsandblossoms on Tumblr, concerning fandom communication around femslash. Originally posted on October 1, 2014.

[@bootsandblossoms said, in response to someone posting disparaging complaints in the femslash tag]:

> You know how you get the fic you want to see in the world? (Besides the obvious solution of writing it yourself?!?!!) Follow the femslash writers you like. Comment on their stuff. Praise them. Like their stuff in the tag. Reblog and have a meltdown over how excited you are to find things that you love published for free on public websites. Make friends. And then, once the relationships are developed and based on genuine gratitude, maybe you can make prompts or fic requests. You don’t go into the tag they hang out in and go on to bash and invalidate every single one of them.

I agree that that post was super silly and I think your suggestions about how to encourage f/f writing are spot-on. Semi-relatedly:

One thing that’s frustrating to me about the hyperbolic quality of so much Tumblr discourse, is that there doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to separate statements 1 and 2:

  1. I like to eat oysters and literally nobody in the world gives them to me free!! And when people do give me free oysters they’re Kumamoto oysters, not Pacific oysters! Kumamoto oysters are shit compared to Pacific oysters, why can’t literally anyone on earth respect the fine art of oyster-eating enough to see that???
  2. Huh, I am kind of taken aback by the prevalence of flank steak over any other kind of food around here. I mean not that there’s anything wrong with flank steak, but I do have to admit that when I moved to this tidal estuary I kind of expected a bit more seafood. Some sole maybe, or an oyster or two. Sometimes I go harvest some oysters from the oyster bed, but when I serve them, people tell me that’s disgusting, or that they normally hate oysters but my sauce is so good they suppose they can choke them down. Why do you think that’s the case? Maybe if we occasionally went fishing together, we could expand our palates.



  
So like: as a purveyor of metaphorical oysters in fandom town (by which I mean: as someone who has spent the last three years writing hundreds of thousands of words of explicit f/f fiction and sharing it for free on the internet), it’s easy for me to hear the first statement as really offensive. “What do you mean nobody’s giving away oysters? I slave all day shucking oysters! For every flank steak I give away, there are at least three platters of oysters and Champagne to go with them! Pacifics, Kumamotos, Bluepoints, Wellfleets, you name it! I’ve got oysters on the half shell and oysters with lemon butter and oysters tying each other up and crying on each others’ shoulders and romanticizing each other left and right and struggling with their little oyster feelings, what more do you want from me??” It’s really easy to hear statements like #1 as “you’re not doing well enough” or “your work isn’t appreciated” or “you tried to do what I’m describing but since I’m claiming nobody ever does it, you obviously failed,” or even “you, for some reason, don’t count.”

But the second statement, the one that reflects on larger patterns within fandom—as a purveyor of oysters in a seaside town that IS undeniably and somewhat puzzlingly dominated by flank steak, I think those are legitimate and sometimes pretty interesting conversations to have (if, I must admit, repetitive after about the sixth go-round). And we should be able to talk about those trends without shaming individual flank-steak producers (m/m writers, in case you’re just joining us), LET ALONE shaming individual oyster purveyors (f/f and het writers)—but that’s hard when all the rhetoric is so inflated, and uses phrases like “nobody ever” and “everyone always.” I know that tone-policing is very frowned upon around here, often with good reason, but when people who essentially agree (“oysters are great! I’d love to eat more of them!”) end up alienating each other by one party essentially claiming the other doesn’t exist, that hardly seems productive. IMO it would be GREAT, and avoid a lot of heartache and hurt feelings, if we could distinguish, both in our own minds and in the words we use, what we’re actually claiming about f/f sex writing and its production and reception. Because I think a lot of the time the intention is to say something more like #2, but the message communicated is absolutely #1. 

On the other hand, maybe that person intended #1 from the start. In which case, I’m not really sure what to say.


	3. On personal motivations for writing f/f fiction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A short essay written in response to a prompt from @saathi1013 on Tumblr, and originally posted on May 2, 2014.

So, Saathi1013 made a post earlier today asking “Why do you write(/read) fanfic with female characters? or: Why do you write(/read) femmeslash?” and below is my response. It’s not meant to speak for anyone but myself; but a personal response was asked for, and that’s what I wrote. 

***

I feel a kind of—bone-deep lack, in the culture I live in, around the unacknowledged urgency of female sexuality. I am a woman who overwhelmingly prefers to sleep with other women; and I am also a woman whose primary reason for leaving a thirteen-year partnership, was that I was sexually unfulfilled; and I am also a woman who dislikes children; and I am also a woman whose first instinct is generally to challenge rather than to nurture; and I am also a woman who craves solitude and artistic expression above human company. And in all of these things I feel a just—starving lack of fellowship with the vast majority of female media portrayals. 

And a lot of the time, when I do unearth some example of a female character who shares some of these traits, the media source offers her to me only to yank her away again. BBC Irene Adler, for example: she’s gay and self-reliant, like me… oh, except it turns out that’s just a plot device to make Sherlock Holmes look sexy. Or, like—I’m still so _fucking angry_ about the movie _Enchanted_ , in which there’s this tremendously successful fashion-designer businesswoman who owns her own boutique in NYC, and as the movie begins she seems perfectly happy and fulfilled… but secretly she turns out to be unhappy because she designs with black rather than pastels, and isn’t married to a fairy-tale prince. And I felt like that film was just a—just a _slap in the face_ , to women like me, saying _you’re just pretending, or you just think you’re happy but really what you need is to find the right man_. 

And I think all of this, this preponderance of female characters who are denied any sharp edges, who are denied complexity, whose lusts and desires are represented as somehow lesser than mens'—I think all that has an effect on peoples’ real-world perceptions. I know that, as I talked to friends and loved ones following my separation a year and a half ago, people were eager—nay, _desperate_ —to explain away my decision in any terms other than sexual ones. “I left him because I was sexually unfulfilled,” I’d say, and they’d say “Well I can see how you wouldn’t want to live in such a cluttered house,” or “it must have been difficult dealing with his [behavior X]s and [behavior Y]s,” or “You can tell me: was it that you wanted kids and he didn’t?” [Fucking: _why would you think this_?? When have I ever so much as hinted that I was interested in raising kids??] And all in all, SO FEW PEOPLE were willing to take seriously how shitty it felt, to be a woman in a long-term monogamous relationship where my sexual needs weren’t being met, and weren’t going to be met. Why is that hard to fathom? Why? We have literally THOUSANDS of stories about male characters in exactly that situation; nobody blinks an eye. 

So I feel a bone-deep compulsion to write, not just fiction about women, but sexually explicit fiction about women; and sexually explicit fiction about complicated, sharp-edged, not-necessarily-good-people women; and sexually explicit fiction about women who _want_ sex, like—not women who are putting up with sex because they’re in love and it’s what the other person wants; not women who do want sex but only because it’s this special True Love partner (not that there’s anything inaccurate about either portrayal, they’re just not what I particularly want to write); but women who, _in the presence of emotional connection or no_ , are sexually drawn to other women and act on that desire. Women whose lusts and infatuations are viewed as equally strong and compelling as mens’; because that’s been my experience, that’s been my—passionate and forcibly life-changing experience; but it’s not what I see reflected in mainstream media, or in peoples’ assumptions about me as a woman in the real world. 

And it’s not even so much a political statement—though, you know, the personal is political etc. etc. It’s more that every time I find a character (Rachel Bailey from _Scott and Bailey_ ; Claire from _I’m Not There_ ) or create or adapt a character, who shares these certain unacknowledged realities with me, it feels like a part of myself that’s usually parched, is suddenly awash in cool water, and can grow.


	4. Response to Anon (representation of female sexuality)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to an Anon ask regarding diverse representation of female sexuality. Originally published on April 26, 2014.

> **Anonymous asked:** Do you ever find that even stories that attempt to be open minded about women's experiences with sex can have pressures to conform to the "right" kind of sex/orgasm/expression? I recently read a story (fanfic) where a female POV character was rude about how her male partner's ex had never had multiple orgasms from him since, to this POV character, the problem "wasn't with his equipment". Seriously? So now women who don't get multiple orgasms are "doing it wrong"? Ditto g-spot discussions.

Ahahahaha well. Hm.

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt here, Anon, and assume that you are asking this genuinely, and not as an attempt to put me on the defensive about a story by my best friend, which I in fact betaed. Given that you know me well enough to ask me this kind of question, it seems… surprising, that that personal connection would take you unawares. But not impossible! So. Let’s move on.

There are really two questions I’d like to address here:

  1. Do I sometimes experience social/political pressure to only tell certain kinds of stories about female sexuality?
  2. Do I think that rudeness from a POV character who assumes her own sexual experiences are more universal than they actually are, is an example of said sexual hegemony?



  
I’m betting that savvy readers can predict where I will fall on both these issues, but I’ll press on nonetheless.

**1\. Do I experience social/political pressure to only tell the “right” stories about female sexuality?**

Yes, definitely. The big conflicts that leap to mind for me on this are the debate about whether BDSM, particularly BDSM with a female submissive, is inherently anti-feminist (possibly obviously, IMO it’s not); and that stupid ongoing back-and-forth in the queer community about whether scissoring is “just a porn thing” (wow I hope not, since I engaged in some very enjoyable scissoring just this past Thursday). There’s a similar phenomenon at work, I think, that explains why the sex in so many lesbian romance novels is (in my opinion) dull, dull, DULL: according to a certain strain of 1970s feminism, any kind of power exchange or even strong sexual passion is inherently patriarchal, so the f/f sex that got written ended up purged of much of its narrative interest, at least for me.

At its best, I think the sex-positive third-wave reaction corrects that 70s idea, positing instead that women are a sexually diverse group with a sexually diverse set of desires that are just as strong and compelling as other peoples’, and as long as everything they engage in is mutually consensual, that diversity should be celebrated. At its worst, of course, the third wave turns into a knee-jerk let’s-all-be-happy-about-all-sex-all-the-time debacle that can feel as coercive as the ideas it’s trying to supplant—and from what I’m picking up from your ask, you may be finding that latter manifestation grating.

I don’t blame you one bit! It’s totally galling to be told that you’re “doing sex wrong” when you are doing what works for you and gets you off (or doesn’t, if you incline that way). For the record, in case anyone’s wondering: some women get multiple orgasms and others don’t; some women like penetration and others don’t; some women enjoy direct g-spot stimulation and others don’t; some women get off on oral and others don’t; some women have vaginas and others don’t; some women like nipple play and others don’t; some women masturbate and others don’t; and on and on for pretty much every sexual act or tendency you can imagine. Even within a single person there can be a huge variation: I get really different sexual cravings tipsy versus sober, for example. 

In short, bodies are so cool and interesting ‘cause they’re all different! I think it’s very natural and human (and I go into this more below) that we all extrapolate from our own embodied experiences; but it’s good to keep in mind what a wide diversity of other experiences exist out there in the world, and they are all stories that deserve to be told and recognized.

On a more writerly note:

**2\. Do I think that rudeness from a POV character who assumes her own sexual experiences are more universal than they actually are, is an example of sexual hegemony?**

No. Not necessarily—and since I’m 95% sure that the story you’re asking about is one I happen to be intimately familiar with, I can answer more categorically that I don’t think it is in this case. The thing about POV characters, like any characters, is that they are fallible individuals, and their actions and opinions need to be evaluated within the larger context of the story. The voice of the POV character, in other words, is very often distinct from the voice of the author; and POV characters, like other characters, fuck up.

(Or at least—and this is the writer HBBO speaking—POV characters ought to fuck up, because real people fuck up. When I encounter a POV character speaking and acting in flawless talking-points downloaded directly from Planned Parenthood— _however much I love Planned Parenthood, and I love them a lot_ —I find myself wishing that the author had written an op-ed blog post rather than a piece of fiction.)

In this particular story, we’ve got a female POV character who shows all signs of being straight. Her direct sexual experience of women is therefore likely limited to how sex works for her personally, which is that she’s frequently multiply orgasmic. Her indirect sexual experience of women includes a medical degree (with a specialty in pathology), gossip with female friends, and whatever magazines/books/TV shows/media she happens across—but as I said above, I think everyone is prone to extrapolating from their own experience, even if they kind of know better. When I encounter BBC Irene Adler’s long lacquered talons, for example, I have a kneejerk reaction of: “Yeah right, like any lesbian…” even though I know that there undoubtedly are lesbians who wear their nails like that. Part of the subtlety of interacting with other humans is learning when it’s best to suppress or think twice about that “…really???” response, when one runs into data that jar with one’s own experience.

To my mind what’s going on in the scene you mention, and how it’s presented within [the story](https://archiveofourown.org/works/578410/chapters/1037830), is that Molly comes into contact with data that contradict her own experience, and her brain-to-mouth filter, as it often does in canon, makes the wrong call:

> “That,” he says, “was amazing.”  
>    
>  “It can hardly be news to you that women get multiple orgasms,” she says.  
>    
>  “Well,” he says. “It’s different in theory and practice.”  
>    
>  She turns towards him. “You’re kidding.”  
>    
>  He’s very pink. He doesn’t say anything.  
>    
>  “Wait,” she says, “I know it’s no complaints with the equipment and I know it’s not about stamina, so whatever she—”  
>    
>  He’s tensing. He pushes up onto his elbow and then sits up.  
>    
>  She feels herself flush all over. “Oh my God,” she says, humiliated, “Oh, God, I’m so sorry, that—that was unbelievably—I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I said that.”  
>    
>  “It’s all right,” he says. He hands her her knickers, and she tugs them on cringing. “Really, Molly. Slip of the tongue.”

  
Molly herself realizes almost immediately here, that she’s said something really rude and inappropriate; and she apologizes, in that trademark verbal-faux-pas-followed-by-cringing-apology Molly Hooper style. The _story_ , in other words, is not presenting Molly’s assumptions about non-multiply-orgasmic women as a positive. It’s presenting them as a mistake. The story, on the contrary, is presenting the reader with _evidence_ that, even with the same partner, some women find multiple orgasms easy to achieve whereas for others they’re more difficult or even impossible (or, read alternately: that different people just have different sexual dynamics with different partners). So, I’d argue that while this version of the _character_ Molly Hooper might be falling into one of the third-wave traps you’re taking about, Anon, the story itself is pretty clearly working against that same trap.

Is that to say that all stories where a female character is rude about another woman not being multiply orgasmic, will fall under the same rubric? Of course not. There are near-infinite ways to write a feminist story, and near-infinite ways to write an anti-feminist story, and _truly_ infinite ways to write a story that falls into the messy grey area in between. Which is why what characters do, and what they say, need to be questioned, need to be evaluated within the larger context of the scene and the story where they appear.


	5. Response to Anon (Limited scope of sex positivity)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A response to an Anon ask on Tumblr, originally published January 31, 2014.

> **Anonymous asked:** Do you ever find certain strains of woman centric sex positivity to be stifling? I mean, I get that we all desire and get off differently but sometimes I feel the "if you can't pleasure yourself, a partner never will!" and "OMG vibrators!" culture really limiting to those of us who place masturbation and arousal in completely separate psycho-sensual boxes. I'm less interested in genital stimulation than in body heat, skin on skin, the interaction with a partner. Thoughts?

First of all, and because I don’t want it to get buried under the rest of my response: yes. I definitely hear what you’re saying, Anon. My personal feelings about it are complicated, but I just wanted to express my solidarity with your position here.

Further thoughts:

 **I think, in general, it’s very hard to navigate the tension between, on one hand, the complexity of actual lived human experience, and, on the other hand, a message that’s sufficiently catchy and repeatable that it functions well in media campaigns.** IMO the sort of simplified “OMG vibrators!!” sex-positivity you’re talking about, is a sound-bite-style response to the misogynist messaging that predominates in the media. Great, as far as it goes! Which is, as you point out, not that far.

And I mean, REALLY FUCKING SADLY, the thing about pop media campaigns is that they just suck at accommodating subtlety. Since news outlets are so prone to bowdlerizing statements for maximum scandal value, the goal when crafting talking points is to clarify one’s message to the extent that it literally can’t be taken out of context and misinterpreted even if a reporter is actively trying to edit one in a misleading way. That, combined with the time and character limits that apply to a lot of pop media, and the (perceived) need for a “united front” among feminist sex activists, all combine to create a set of dumbed-down messages which fall far short of accommodating the complexity of human sexuality.

When I was doing peer education through Planned Parenthood—going into high schools and presenting to students—we tried to talk about exactly what you’re bringing up: the idea of skin hunger, of craving physical contact and body heat from a partner regardless of whether one shares orgasms with that person. We also tried to talk about the full range of orgasming-with-other-person style activities, and safer sex and risk reduction practices, and masturbation strategies, and preferential abstinence, and and and. And we had, usually, an hour and a half to cover all of it. With the additional consideration that we didn’t want to just lecture to the students, but to involve them in dialogue. I ended up finding it legitimately heartbreaking, what a small percentage of our overall aims we ended up addressing. 

I mean, I—I do think media campaigns, and communications strategies, and simplified messages like the ones you mention, I think they have power for good. But from a—both from a fiction-writing and from a personal-experience perspective, those simplified messages stop short of what I find really _interesting_ about humans sexing each other up.

This is one reason I’m so passionate about individual humans writing honestly _**and with complexity**_ about sex—whether it be emotionally complex sex between fictional characters, or creative nonfiction about the author’s own sexual experiences. Because normalizing a wide variety of ways of relating to sexuality and sensuality, complete with individual nuance that connects to complex psychology and emotion, can only be a positive. But I do understand why it’s not really… not really _possible_ , in a media-campaign setting. Which is, unfortunately and by its very nature, a lot of what gets widely proliferated.


	6. Response to Anon (Safer sex and erotica)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to an anonymous Tumblr ask from December 13, 2013, regarding the prerogative or lack thereof to write safer sex as part of erotica.

> **Anonymous asked:** What are your thoughts regarding safer sex and erotica? Particularly safer sex amongst queer women, a demographic that does not, in my experience, talk about or practice safer sex nearly enough? Do you feel there is an ethical pressure to normalize and popularize safer sex in our erotica, in hopes that if we work safer sex into our fantasies we are more likely to incorporate it into our reality? This is not intended as a criticism of fic w/o safer sex, just food for thought.

Such an interesting question, Anon!

I, personally, do not write fiction as a how-to guide, in any way or on any level. I know that’s far from universal in the fic-writing world—which is totally legit, don’t get me wrong. I see a lot of talk about “We write the men we wish we saw in the world,” or “I want to normalize [BDSM/queer sex/nonbinary characters/whatever] in my writing,” or “I want to write sex scenes that model how to support someone recovering from trauma,” or similar. And I think that’s great, if that’s what you feel called to do! In that situation, where fiction is a kind of visualization tool, being the change we want to see in the world, I can definitely get behind the argument for making a point of writing safer-sex practices in the hopes of, as you say, normalizing them in fantasy and real life. 

But personally, that’s not my primary relationship with fiction at all. I’m not trying to write the world I want to see; I’m trying to write the world I do see*. I’m trying to write characters like the people I actually know in my real life, flawed and messy and poor decision-makers as we are. I want to write characters fucking up repeatedly, and sometimes suffering for it and sometimes not, and sometimes being redeemed and sometimes not. I do want to turn readers on, and I do want to be progressive—those things are both important to me— **but even more than that I want to write high-quality fiction-that-works-as-fiction, where sex is an integral part of the story, indispensable to the character development and even plot development**. That’s my—that’s really my number-one goal. That’s why I got into fanfic to begin with: because the “literary establishment” says that can’t be done, and I wanted to do it.

Which sometimes means, like—for example: I do want more positive portrayals of loving, responsible BDSM. But I’m not setting out to write a “positive BDSM story.” That kind of approach is just… so uninspiring as to be kind of paralyzing to me, when I sit down at my computer. And when I was writing [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164), it became apparent that there were some pretty fucked-up things about the Irene character’s psychology around domming—which I think is understandable and sympathetic, given that it’s 1908, she’s 16 years old, and she has no role models at all, let alone sexual ones, for the kind of person she wants to be. In fact, I think it would ring really really false if that character spontaneously developed a healthy, modern-progressive relationship with kink (or with anything, frankly). So, in that situation my priority is definitely to be true to character over anything else, even though it made me uncomfortable to think that the story might be read as anti-BDSM. 

The issue of safer sex practices is the same. My number-one priority is always going to be “what would this particular character do in this particular situation?” Since I write a lot of unplanned, conflicted, bad-decision sex between women living between 1900 and 1960, it often seems extremely unrealistic that the idea would even occur to them. (Especially since knowledge of safer-sex practices tended to be very scanty, if not downright incorrect, during those periods even for hetero couples.) There are cases where it might occur to a character—like the first f/f sex scene in my current novel-length project, in which Irene is a sex worker of long experience—and in those cases it’s a matter of whether or not, given all the other facets of their situation and their character, they would choose to bring it up or have it be a limit or a priority or whatever. But the characterization is always going to come first, for me.

Which isn’t to say that scenes and even plots involving safer sex can’t be a part of the kinds of stories I’m interested in telling. The main Sherlock/John arc in greywash’s [As many names as snow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/578410/chapters/1037830) is a great example, I think, of a place where realistic characters are dealing with emotional fallout around safer-sex practices (or lack thereof) in a realistic and compelling way. It’s a false dichotomy, certainly, to say that you can either write realistic, compelling people or you can address this kind of issue. And there are certainly characters, and character dynamics, where it’s not really an “issue” at all: of where the practice of safer sex would be a limit, priority, or the norm, and it would make sense to write them that way. But essentially, my answer is no: I don’t feel an ethical pressure to do anything in my fiction except what serves the emotional and psychological development of the characters.


	7. Response to dirtycorzaharkness (Writing f/f sex)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Response to an ask from dirtycorzaharkness. Originally posted to Tumblr on September 20, 2013.

> **dirtycorzaharkness asked:** Hi! The name's Corza, Theopoiesis sent me your way because, well, I have a lovely lesbian couple I want to write smut for. But I find myself at a loss of where to begin [my primary genre of writing is gay men smut, so the gay ladies? throwing me for a loop!] I'd love it if you could give me a few pointers. Many thanks, dear.

Hi there, Corza! Man, I really apologize that it’s taken me so long to reply to this! I was a bit intimidated by all my conflicting thoughts and feelings about it; as you can see by the length, they are legion. But I’m flattered that Theo thought of me. And wanting to write f/f smut for a lovely lesbian couple is just about the sweetest thing ever; I am so charmed.

So. On the one hand, I personally approach sex writing pretty much identically, regardless of the genders of the characters involved. I take a really story-and-scene-specific approach: what is the work that the sex needs to do in this particular scene? The characters and(/or) reader should start in one place and get to another; once I know the basic trajectory I try to just write toward the goal. (“Just.” Cue bitter laughter.) In any case, I’m having a hard time thinking about concerns or approaches that are specific to f/f rather than f/m or m/m or moresomes or whatever. My basic mantra is:

“What makes it hot for the participants? What do they want? What are they struggling with? What are they lying about? How are their bodies expressing physiologically their lies and their struggles and their desires?”

Lather, rinse, repeat. Those physiological expressions might be slightly different in a scene between two cis-ladies than they would be in a scene between two cis-dudes…though, really, much remains the same. Hands and mouths and gooseflesh and sweat and heartbeats and stuttered half-phrases are all still present; there is still wetness and the hardening of erectile tissue. Long story short, it seems to me that there’s more individual variation in character motivation and arousal, than blanket variation between lady-sex and dude-sex. I would just think about my individual characters: what their dynamic is like; what draws them to each other and what drives them insane about each other; what they linger on when they’re alone in bed at night, thinking about the other person. And then: how do their bodies express those things?

All that said, I will say that I’ve noticed certain patterns in porn writing involving female rather than male bodies, and I have (shocker) Opinions, about said patterns. This is the part of my response that I’ve really been agonizing over, because I don’t want to say that anyone is doing it “wrong.” I also want to avoid, in this context, any speculation about why said patterns exist, as that’s neither here nor there as far as How To Write HBBO’s Ideal Lady-Centric Sex Story. Which, let’s be clear: you don’t need to be writing the kind of thing I like to read, in order to be writing GREAT, A+ sex scenes. The stuff I like to read and write is what I know how to talk about, though, so I’m going to soldier on.

So here is the thing: when I first got into fandom, what really blew me away was how fanfic porn (which is, as we know, overwhelmingly m/m) married explicit, embodied writing about sex and desire, to such a rich sense of the characters as people, with backstories and complex psychology that were reflected in the sex as written. So that the sex was both an integrated part of (a) the story being told, and (b) the lives of the characters as people. Writers lingered lovingly over BOTH the physicality of sex and desire (the sweat and the precome and the bruised love-bites—dudes getting hot for each other); AND the specific ways in which that physicality reflected the rest of the character’s lives. So that a lot of the power of, to take a popular example, a Holmes/Watson sex scene, might come from Holmes’s struggle between his habitual extreme reserve, and his desire to, you know, put his mouth all over Watson’s skin. He is having this struggle in his mind and also in his body: the way he moves and freezes and speaks and thinks are all part of it. And he continues to have it even after he is having sex. That, in my opinion, is what makes it so hot!

I see this combination MUCH less frequently in f/f porn.

Much of the time, f/f porn falls into one of two categories. Either 1) the characters have complex psychology and backstory, and may fall in love with each other but all touching is of the tentative, soft-focus-in-flower-fields variety, which could almost be divorced from physicality completely, and is certainly divorced from urgent sexual desire; or, 2) the characters have messy, embodied sex, but it’s both less interesting and less hot than it could be, because they seem to lack any real feelings about one another, or about the sex they’re having, or even about themselves. To take my Holmes/Watson example, it would be as if we had to choose between, on the one hand, seeing Holmes struggle and struggle with his own desires, only to give in to them and plant a single chaste kiss on Watson’s cheek; or, on the other hand, cutting straight to the spit-and-come-soaked face-fucking, but divorced from any indication of what those physical actions might mean to either of the men who are doing them. Oddly, writers of m/m porn seem not to struggle with uniting these two aspects of sex-writing, but it seems to be trickier on the f/f front.

And GOSH it’s tempting to hypothesize about why that might be. My fingers almost literally itch to do so. I will refrain.

For the purposes of this post I’ll just say that by far my favorite porn—all porn, not just f/f, but it’s especially difficult to find f/f porn for which this is true—incorporates full embodiment (including passion, including straight-up horniness—so often unacknowledged in women’s narratives), as well as developed character psychology and tangible relationships (even if what’s tangible is that they’re anonymous strangers) among the characters involved.

If that seems like a tall order, it…totally is! And I read and enjoy a ton of porn that doesn’t live up to my gold standard. It’s always easiest to learn by example, though, so if you’re curious, here are a few which do (and which also might help you answer more specific questions that I didn’t touch on):

  * **holyfant’s[Photophobia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/541561)** (Sherlock, Irene Adler/Kate) and **waldorph’s[RED](https://archiveofourown.org/works/411655)** (Avengers, Natasha Romanov/Maria Hill): These two stories are both explicitly character-studies, the first one of Kate and the second of Natasha. As such they’re a bit longer, and cover a timespan of years. They’re also both spectacular, and feature smokin’ hot f/f sex that draws on the rich backstories and relationship dynamics developed over the course of their lengths. Long character study isn’t the only way to do what I’m talking about here, not by a long shot, but when it’s done well it can really sing.
  * **peevee’s[Vespers](https://archiveofourown.org/works/577605)** (Sherlock, Rule 63 Sherlock/John): This is a great example of a short piece with a very limited timeline, in which the characters still feel like they have meaningful psychology and emotions vis-a-vis the porn. You don’t have to write an epic character study in order to accomplish this, is I guess what I’m saying. Also: soft touching and exploration CAN be fully embodied!
  * **what_alchemy’s[Thirty-Two Years](https://archiveofourown.org/works/461477)** (Sherlock, Mycroft/original female character): This is het, but it does a GREAT job at what I was talking about re: writing a sexual, embodied, fully-realized female character whose embodiedness and backstory add about 3000% to the hotness of the sex and also the emotional weight of the fic as a whole. Part of a larger arc, but can be read independently.
  * **peninsulam’s[The Most Marvelous Place to Get Lost](https://archiveofourown.org/works/884251)** (The Hour, Bel Rowley/Lix Storm): This stands on its own as original fic; I have never seen The Hour, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s more melancholy than hot per se, but it is a lovely example of sex writing that is so saturated in character emotion and psychology/backstory that the whole delicious web could never be untangled.
  * **Clara Caverly/Kikuna Matata’s[In Portland](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863162)** (original fic, OFC/OFC): Full disclosure, I helped beta this. I nonetheless stand behind it as an awesome example of gritty, passionate, dirty f/f fucking that is grounded in a character’s psychology and specific relationship. In fact, most of the actual fucking in the story happened in the past (or never happened), and is remembered/fantasized about through a lens that is half-petulant, half-nostalgic, and all resentful. So again: character psychology is absolutely key to the porn, here.
  * Annnnd, since this whole question was directed at me-as-f/f-sex-writer, I will say that my favorite thing of mine that does the above in a relatively compact format is still **breathedout’s[Atthis, once long ago](https://archiveofourown.org/works/564109)** (Spring Fire, Leda Taylor/Susan Mitchell, though it was also written to stand on its own as original fic). I think what I like about this story is that Susan just lies and lies and lies in a way that reveals a lot more than it conceals, and the way the sex plays out is very much a part of that. 



OKAY, that is patently far more than you ever wanted to know, and…maybe simultaneously less. I’m sorry I don’t have a more immediately useful answer, like “boobs are hot” or “lesbians are typically into x, y, and z,” but maybe this will be worthwhile? In any case, I think it’s the best I can do. Thanks again for getting in touch! <3


	8. On the bad sex awards: why they make me uncomfortable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Essay on the prudish, sex-shaming execution of the Bad Sex Awards, and why they're harmful for literary fiction and contribute to the continued marginalization of erotic writing. 
> 
> Originally published February 26, 2013

Well, it’s that time of the year again: the Bad Sex Awards are out, there are [funny sex scene snippets making the rounds](http://victoriousvocabulary.tumblr.com/post/37939421785/extracts-from-this-years-finalists-for-the-bad-sex-in), and I am chuckling uncomfortably and trying to bite my tongue.*

But…my tongue will not remain bitten. I have to say, at the risk of being a killjoy, that the whole concept–or rather, the execution–of the awards seems to me insidious. As [this article](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/one-bad-sex-award-winners-view-on-the-bullying-prudery-and-ignorance-that-tries-to-shut-down-8368319.html) by former “winner” Rowan Somerville brilliantly points out, the passages are taken out of all narrative context, and **read as if the only possible goal of a sex scene is to titillate** , which—spoiler alert!—is radically untrue. What’s more, the judges, in many cases, have not read the entire books, only the nominated passages. As such they have no idea about the author’s goals in writing the scene as he or she has done.To divorce sex writing from its larger purpose within a narrative, and then snicker at the choices the author made in writing it, strikes me as essentially prudish and sexuality-shaming, not to mention grossly un-subtle in its understanding of, you know, HOW STORIES WORK.

For example, maybe an author is using ridiculous euphemisms for genitalia because their POV character can’t bear to think of them any other way. Maybe they’re writing a picaresque novel or a fabliau, in which the treatment of sex is **supposed** to be raunchy and slapstick-comedic (not having read any of the books referenced on this year’s list, I am guessing this last is the case with the Mason novel). Maybe they’re writing well about bad sex, rather than writing badly about good sex. Maybe they’re writing well about complicated sex, elements of which are gross or funny or traumatic. Somerville writes:

> I know that [the audience members] are going to enjoy themselves when it comes to my novel. It is essentially about sexual abuse. The way the protagonists have sex is meant to be an expression of childhood experiences about which neither is consciously aware. The sex is deliberately wrong, cringeworthy, full of expressions of disassociation, of blocked passion and misunderstood urges.  
>   
> When the young man finally has sex it is “like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin”. This is meant to be an inappropriate and gruesome image. When the actress reads out the passage in a mawkish moan, the crowd erupts.

  
Wow, that awards atmosphere really sounds like a sophisticated discussion of literary themes, and not at all like bullying on a playground.

Somerville also points out that:

> **The magazine editor [and award founder] has been quoted as saying that sex in books “just doesn’t work, I don’t think there are any cases where it works”.** So one wonders if this award is anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing.

  
Even as I struggle to tell myself it’s “just a bit of fun” and that I’m overreacting, this is VERY MUCH how the award strikes me: prudishness dressed up as fun-poking. And I disagree most vehemently with the editor of the Literary Review. I think sex in books CAN work, and well. I feel there should be more of it: that it should be ever more nuanced, more diverse, more eloquent, more experimental. Not less.

I don’t think we should be aiming for sex writing that **can** be divorced from its narrative context, in which every sentence or every paragraph is understandable on its own. If that were the goal, why write novels in the first place? Why not just write epigrams? Yes, sex writing out of context can seem wooden or silly or ridiculous or creepy. Guess what? SEX IN THE REAL WORLD can also seem wooden and silly and ridiculous and creepy. Should this not be reflected in our art?

Essentially, this event punishes literary writers for addressing sexuality in their books in any kind of surprising or unusual way. (Note that JK Rowling and EL James are not on this year’s list: the LR’s rationale is that James is insufficiently “literary” and that Rowling’s sex is more generic than bad–implying a calculus where the judges would rather be bored by the same old thing in erotic writing, rather than be, horror of horrors, taken by surprise.)

What a shock, then, to find that mainstream writers and publishers of “literary fiction” are more and more reluctant to include sex in their books: this is what they have to look forward to, if they try to push the boundaries of established sex-writing and think outside the box.


End file.
